Kamala Markandaya’s Bombay Tiger: The Representation of Socio-Cultural Life

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to study the representation of socio-cultural life in Kamala Markandaya’s Bombay Tiger. Being a leading post-independent Indian novelist, Kamala Markandaya has candidly portrayed Indian social, cultural and political life through her novels. She has rightly reflected these aspects in the work Bombay Tiger. Her description of various aspects and dimensions of cultural life is not imaginary and based on some literature, but it is based on carefully observed traditions and depicted cultural values and ideas. Soon after the death of Kamala Markandaya her daughter Kim Oliver found a typewritten copy of her novel and it was published posthumously with the title ‘Bombay Tiger’ in 2008. Charles R. Larson, one of the close friends of Markandaya and Professor of Literature, American University, Washington, DC has written an introduction to novel Bombay Tiger (2008) where he writes: Reading Bombay Tiger twenty years after Kamala Markandaya began writing the novel is a kind of revelation – especially for what it says about contemporary India” (Larson xii). Although Markandaya lived in abroad she kept in touch with the India. She actively read English newspapers which provided excellent coverage of occurrences in the commonwealth in general and India in particular. It has been rightly said that Kamala Markandaya’s “Sense of India was always extraordinarily vivid, filled with rich vitality, and imaginative in the way of all great writers (and especially novelists) who have been connected to place (Larson xii).